Boffins build JELL-O memory for your brain A team of US researchers has fashioned a memory circuit that may provide an electronic bridge between man and machine. "Our memory device is soft and pliable, and functions extremely well in wet environments – similar to the human brain," one of the researchers, Michael Dickey, said when announcing the breakthrough. To …
This particular mix of chemicals, they believe so.
There may be others the body thinks of as neutral (eg, you don't need immuno-suppressants to keep an artificial hip joint in, or numerous other artificial replacement parts).
In fact, an issue with current artificial parts is the body's tendencies to ignore them! The effort going into making coatings that body tissue will actually join itself to is also a quite big area of research - that titanium hip joint would be 10x better if the remaining bone tissue would grow into it instead of it all having to be held together with pins!
I can see the advantages of a "Mimetic Polyalloy" neural interface.
The main headache (pun INTENDED!) is that as Arkasha says the water based gel may be recognised as foreign.
Has anyone done any studies into the long term effects of gallium/indium alloys in the human body? I vaguely recall reading that gallium was studied as an alternative to toxic mercury in dental amalgams as it can be handled safely.
Maybe the problem here was the expense of gallium?
This is amazing work, Ga-In polymer based memristors might be cheaper to manufacture than inorganic ones and substantially higher density as the polymer can be laid down in much the same way as an OLED with a more or less conventional inkjet print head.
My prices for Gallium were $3/g and In at $3-5/g That's *gram* not kilogram. Granted they are pretty old (and these things are fairly light) but I'd guess this will be a bit expensive.
Indium *seems* fairly human friendly but I think Gallium is a bit more suspect (although much less so than that other element of GaAs Arsenic).
Deity knows I'd love to just plug assorted knowledge into my head on demand (provided of course you could pull it out later).
All of which misses *the* big question.
*How* does the human brain encode information? You can attach electrodes to the nerves from the ear and the eye and look at the result on an oscilloscope or through a speaker.
It doesn't look like a picture and it *definitely* does not sound like sound.
So until you solve that little problem (along with how to trigger memory recall, and encode the information on your implant in such a way that it can be *understood* by your brain) this will solve nothing.
*That* problem seems as far away from being solved as ever.
Isn't that expensive, I paid around £10 for 10 grams a year ago.
It IS messy stuff, gets everywhere. I found the best way to avoid this is to always handle it with gloves, and put it in a glass container.
The small amount of Ga-In I had left after my last experiment went awry went in said glass container and there is still about 0.3 grams left which is enough for dozens of experiments.
It also forms a nice alloy with copper while leaving the underlying surface intact so you can use a piece of protoboard of the solid tracks variety to make a duplicate of this experiment.
Silicone is best bought in the "acetoxy" variety as it doesen't contain acetic acid which would muck up the reaction. Its also probably not going to work without that special polymer, but Borax could work as a sub for the acid side at least and its easy to get hold of.
Some folks are making DIY ultracapacitors that last years so DIY memristors should be doable with some effort though you still have to refresh them as the "half life" is about 3 hours.
Simple timer and "copy location block A to location block B" should suffice, and you too can have your very own DIY megabyte sized memory that takes up about the same space as an Ipad2.
-Andre
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